On the 7th day of Christmas my COO said to me “How can our operations be more customer focused?”

It’s one thing to talk strategically about customer centricity in B2B but it’s another thing completely to engender a real passion for the customer experience amongst the staff who are often tactically managed (even outsourced) and the least well paid in the business.

Yet it is crucial to do so because these staff are the people who actually deliver and support the day-to-day experience that customers receive – the delivery drivers, receptionists, back-office workers, warehouse & factory workers, etc. who represent your company every day. Here’s a checklist to consider how customer focused your Operations are:

People

None of the other parts of this checklist will work if you don’t have your HR aligned to your customer strategy:

How are people targeted & measured and what mandate is there to change things?

Is there a “Way of Working” set out based on defined positive behaviours that are driven by attitude rather than rules?

Is there a standard induction for staff or does it vary by location? Do you put the managers through it as well?

Have any cultural assessments been done? Any other gauges of staff morale?

Does training cover customer centricity as well as product/process/compliance?

An expert in CRM and customer experience management and recognised as a top influencer in the subject e.g. IBM Futurist Roundtable member; Satmetrix Top 50 & SAP Top 60 Customer Experience influencers; Huffington Post Top 100 Customer Service professionals; MindTouch Top 50 Customer Success influencers; and Business Coach Top 100 Management Experts.

Peter's early career was with Rolls-Royce and Bentley Motors, where he trained as an engineer and went on to hold senior roles in commercial and logistics, market analysis, customer satisfaction, regional marketing and in his last client-side position as head of relationship marketing.